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BLOG WEB HOSTING PLATFORMS |
A Web host would store the site pages on its computer and display them to people who visit www.onion.com.
Some Web hosts attract blogging customers by preinstalling powerful blog programs such as Movable Type and WordPress, so the users don’t have to wrestle with difficult installations. These packages, paid by the month or year, represent the most expensive way to blog, but you get a lot for your money: powerful blog software perfectly installed and ready to use. A blog program called Radio UserLand is a different and, in this book, unique type of blogging solution.
Radio UserLand does require installation by the user, but it’s a desktop installation, not a Web server installation. Installing Radio UserLand is on the same technical level as installing a new instant messaging program, a new browser, or a new productivity application on your computer. Once installed, you blog by typing entries into the program, which then uploads them to Radio UserLand’s server and provides the usual content management functions of blog software.
If you’re paying for your blog service, you can sometimes get more storage by paying more money. For text-only blogs (no photos, videos, audio clips, or podcasts), 100 megabytes (the low end) can go a fairly long way. But start piling in photos — and more videos or audio and you’ll hit that ceiling before long.
Ads for income: explore the revenue possibilities of blogging. For the most part, those possibilities consist of running ads on your blog site. You can do this in several ways, from Google’s contextual ad service to banner-ad brokering.
Most blog services allow the inclusion of a photo in a blog entry, but some platforms make it surprisingly difficult. Another issue is whether the service provides photo albums for showcasing your photos in a special page design.
Traffic reporting: Most Web hosts allow their users to monitor the number of visitors to the site. Those statistics usually include page-by-page accounting of visitor hits (visits to that page) and other metrics,such as the number of unique visitors to the site. Blog traffic measurement can operate the same way and is almost never available in social
network sites. Blog measurement is tricky because many readers are not visitors but receivers of the blog’s syndication feed. The traffic of those feeds is notoriously difficult to measure, and most hosts (blog hosts and hybrid hosts) don’t even try.